Pyramid link structure - how to noindex, nofollow
-
I'm talking about this article: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link
Take this sample: HOME --> Shirts --> Plain shirt --> shirt#1
Product page: noindex, follow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts).
SubCategory page (plain shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory.
Category page (shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories.
Front page: noindex, follow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.)
Is it correct? If I noindex some parts of website, will it be harmful?
-
Hi there,
I see what you're trying to do, and I think I understand it. You're attempting to conserve your link equity and flow it only to the most important pages, or what we use to call "pagerank sculpting."
The good news is you don't really need to worry about it. These days, adding nofollow to your links doesn't really increase the equity flowing through the followed links. And in fact, you could be shooting yourself in the proverbial foot by denying equity passing links to your lower product pages.
Best time to use nofollow for internal pages is typically to increase crawling efficiency, or to prevent bots from visiting pages you don't want indexed anyway. Attempting to scuplt link equity in this way could cause lots of unintended negative consequences and my advice would be in most cases to let your link equity flow freely throughout your site in a way that was natural to both humans and bots alike.
Best of luck!
-
I agree with Nitin here.
I think the confusion is perhaps that you're taking the pyramid structure in that Moz article too literally? There is nothing wrong with linking between different pages as Nitin said. In fact, by linking to related/relevant content on your website, you are enforcing the context and the meaning of the pages' content. The diagram in the Moz article is just showing how you should have the minimum number of links possible between the homepage and any given "deep" page on the website. So, using Moz's diagram as an example, from that website's homepage, you can get to their deepest page in only three clicks. The more clicks (or links) the harder the page is to find, and therefore less likely to be found and crawled by Google. Remember that Google has a crawl budget.
So long as you don't have hundreds of links on any one page you are trying to rank and it doesn't take too many links to get to any one page, I wouldn't worry too much it. The nofollow attribute is only to be used when you don't want Google to follow that link and pass link juice between the pages.
-
Well, these aren't "useless" links. After all, they're linking your categories/sub-categories etc. and should be followed by bots even if a HTML snapshot of any page captures 2-3 follow links (from flyout/menu navigation, breadcrumbs etc.) of another page.
Hope this helps!
-
No, I just want get rid of million useless links from both menus and make clean pyramid structure with plain link flow:
(product have only 1 link to subcategory, subcategory have 1 link to category and few links to products and so on). -
No! Don't "nofollow" them. Why do you want to nofollow them now?
You're not spamming here, inter-linking from flyout-navigation/header/footer/on-page-navigation/breadcrumbs are the natural ways people use for internal-linking, that won't hurt you for sure.
-
Alright, I got it, lets forget about noindex, left nofollow only.
Now to have pyramid scheme my plan should look like this, right?
Product page: nofollow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts).
SubCategory page (plain shirts): nofollow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory.
Category page (shirts): nofollow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories.
Front page: nofollow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.)
-
Are you trying to say that you're planning to have multiple URLs for a single product page here? For instance, if you have a product which can be reached from multiple navigation paths, so you want to have those multiple URLs for it?
Like if a product is tagged in category "x" and "x" is a sub-category of category "y", then the number of possible URLs for product page "p" would be
So, here these 2 URLs are candidates of duplicate content penalty and hence, you want to noindex them? Is this what you're trying to explain?
-
Hi,
Well, following "pyramid" scheme and noindexing pages are two different things altogether. Let's not mix them, its creating confusion actually. So, tell me why do you want to noindex your pages?
Using pyramid scheme and optimizing your site's architecture the best possible way can be done independently.
-
If you noindex a page, you are telling Google that you don't want the page to be indexed and it will disappear from Google Search. Are you sure that this is what you want to do? Maybe you are thinking of index, nofollow on Recommended Products instead to reduce the number of links that Google will follow?
-
I just want to follow "pyramid" scheme (see pic in article). If not use noindex, how to do this pyramide?
-
Oh, sorry, I mean product page have lot of links from top, left menu, from "recommended" products. My offer is left only 1 "way out" - to parent category (in this case it Plain shirts).
But if I will noindex "recommended" products, are they will disappear from G. search?..
-
I'm confused. Why would you want to noindex all of those pages? If you don't want those pages to be indexed by Google, tagging them noindex is not harmful at all. But why would you want to noindex the front page, category, subcategory and product page?
-
Hi,
Could you please help me understand your concern here? What do you mean by "noindex, follow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs"?
May be you need to elaborate your concern or share some screenshots to help me understand it.
P.S noindexing a subset of pages is not harmful for sure.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do links in footers or side bars count less than links in the center of the web page?
do links in footers or side bars count less than links in the center of the web page? How much less if so? I have some articles on my site. Would i get more of a boost in rankings to pages of my site by placing links in the text of my articles on my site to other pages on my site? Thanks mozzers!
On-Page Optimization | | Ron100 -
Internal link text
Hi With internal links, should I make sure to always use the same anchor text im trying to rank the page for? For example im having a tidy up and have realised im linking to the same page in multiple blog posts using different anchor text. Whats the rule of thumb here? Thanks Chris
On-Page Optimization | | mrcsleonard1 -
Bad to have "As Seen on" links sitewide
I've seen a lot of people saying that sidewide external links are a no-go. Does this also apply to links of a vanity variety? What I mean by this is "as seen on" links or links to awards given to the business? This intellectually seems okay to me, but I want to make sure I'm not shooting myself in the foot. Any evidence, case studies, anecdotal stories would be appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | Oren.0 -
Cornerstone Page And Outbound Links
I have a cornerstone page and 10 related articles that all have links to the cornerstone page. My question is, should the cornerstone page link back to those 10 articles as well or will it lose juice by doing so? Thanks in advance 😉
On-Page Optimization | | Humanovation0 -
To many links on page and penguin
Could to many links on to many pages be a factor that the penguin update would effect your site. I know this is a broad question , but I am curious what people think.
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich0 -
Site structure suggestions/feedback
I asked this on Reddit and got some some decent answers. I'm curious to see what the pro's of SEOmoz think. I've got a lead generation site for forklift parts--liftxparts.com. You can think of it similar to car parts, where we have sections for specific brands (e.x. Toyota forklift parts) and sections for specific categories (e.x. forklift filters). Right now, the site is structured in two main levels: the top level is a dozen or so brands (separate pages for Toyota forklift parts, Clark forklift parts, etc), and then the second level is the categories (separate pages for a dozen or so different categories like forklift filters, forklift engine parts, etc.).If you check out one of the pages, like Clark forklift parts for example (our top landing page)--liftxparts.com/clark-forklift-parts.html, you'll see that on the brand pages (they're all structured the same), we list all the different categories (with links to the same second level category pages) and "search" buttons. All pages point to the same lead capture form.This has been working pretty well--about 90% of visitors end up on our lead capture form, and a high percentage of those convert. We're working on increasing organic traffic now and I'm thinking our structure could use some improvement.Looking at the analytics, there are a lot more impressions for keywords like "clark forklift" than "clark forklift parts". One gap I've uncovered is while our average position, and by extension CTR and traffic, for phrases like "clark forklift parts" is quite good, it's not so good for broader and higher searched terms like "clark forklift". Should we add another level of hierarchy targeted to just general brands? So now we have content for clark forklift parts, but should we add a page for terms like "clark forklift"? Or should we just add some broader content to the existing brand pages? The pages are quite long already, I'm afraid adding more content to the bottom of the page isn't very functional. Our thinking is that we can increase average position for higher searched terms by adding content targeted to those terms. The question is how exactly to go about it and how to work it into our current site structure? Any feedback related to our site structure or even just related ideas about other ways to approach our goal of increasing organic traffic would be very much appreciated! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | wisamabdulla0 -
Should I noindex both category and tag archive pages if I have an excerpt format?
I am creating a blog and want to know if I should noindex archives for categories and tags. I changed the format of my blog to excerpts to prevent duplicate content, but I want to make sure I also need to noindex those pages. Please help!
On-Page Optimization | | lwilkins1 -
Page title structure?
From an SEO and user perspective what structure do you recommend for page titles. For example (given that they shouldn't ideally be more than 70 characters) :- Keywords (maybe two or three) | Company Name | more keywords I understood the best place for the company name was about second place. Is this now the considered view taking into consideration 'branding' which has been flagged up as the way forward. Keywords are separated by the vertical bar | - any thoughts? For 'house keeping' pages such as Privacy Policy - should this be optmised or simply stated as 'privacy policy' Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PH2920